Posted 1 year ago on Jan. 10, 2014, 6:31 p.m. EST by flip
(7101)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.”

― Martin Luther King “Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”

US President Barack Obama, .Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009 [30]

According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the most significant threat to peace on the planet. The US was voted top threat by a wide margin, receiving 24% of the vote. Pakistan was a very distant second with 8%, followed by China (6%). Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea tied for fourth place at 4%.[1]

“A Black Check in Their ‘McWorld’”

An International Business Times headline on the WINMR-Gallup poll seemed to question the validity and/or rationality of the finding. “In Gallup Poll,” the headline read, “Leading Threat to World Peace is….America?” In reality, however, the United States’ status as by and far away the leading threat to peace in the world’s eyes should be anything but surprising to any serious observer of US foreign policy and the international scene. The US, after all, accounts for nearly half the world’s military spending. It maintains more than 1000 military installations across more than 100 “sovereign” nations spread across every continent. The Obama administration deploys Special Operations forces in 75 to 100 countries (up from 60 at the end of the George W. Bush administration) and conducts regular lethal drone attacks against officially designated terrorists (and a much larger number of innocent civilians) in the Middle East, Southwest Asia and Africa. It maintains a massive global surveillance program dedicated to the de facto elimination of privacy on Earth – a program that has spied even on the personal cell phones of European heads of state, including Germany’s Angela Merkel. As Der Speigel, Germany’s leading newspaper noted in 1997: “Never before in modern history as a country dominated the earth as totally as the United States does today….America is now the Schwarzenegger of international politics: showing off muscles, obtrusive, intimidating….The Americans, in the absence of limits put to them by anybody or anything, act as if they own a kind of blank check in their ‘McWorld.”[2]

No Apology

This Schwarzenegger has gone off on a bit of a one-sided rampage in the current Millennium. The US since September 11, 2001 has killed, maimed, and displaced millions across the Muslim World as part of its Global War on [of] Terror (GWOT). The violence is always conducted in the names of peace, freedom, democracy, and security. An illustrative incident in the US war on/of terror occurred in the first week of May 2009. That’s when US air-strikes killed more 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by US explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As the New York Times reported:

“In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to…the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi…’The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred…Everyone was crying…watching that shocking scene.’ Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including…many women and children.”[3]

The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific incident – one among many mass US aerial civilian killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning in the fall of 2001 – was to blame the deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about loss of innocent life, but the administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge US responsibility.[4] By contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official for scaring New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people there of 9/11.[5]

The disparity was extraordinary: frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology. Nobody had to be fired. And the Pentagon was permitted to advance preposterous claims about how the civilians perished – stories that taken seriously by "mainstream" (corporate-imperial war and entertainment) media. The US subsequently conducted a dubious “investigation” of the Bola Boluk slaughter that slashed the civilian body count and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in the way of US bombs.[6]

“A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained. They trust us to be on side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right.”

US President George H.W. Bush, 1992 [23]

“ The willingness to serve and sacrifice for the greater good is the ultimate tribute to your character and your efforts…The values you learned here….will be able to be spread …throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

US President Bill Clinton, speaking to West Point graduates, 1993 [24]

“When I came into office, I was determined that our country would go into the 21st century still the world’s greatest force for peace and freedom. For democracy, and security, and prosperity.”

US President Bill Clinton, 1996 [25]

“The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”

US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, 1999 [26]

“America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world… Today, our nation saw evil…Our military is powerful, and it's prepared….. we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”

President George W. Bush, September 11, 2001 [27]

“We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good….America is the last, best hope of Earth…. America’s larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom. The American moment has not passed…we will seize that moment, and begin the world anew. “

''It is easy to forget that in his day, in his own country, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a dangerous troublemaker. Even President John Kennedy worried that King was being influenced by Communists. King was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. The establishment's campaign to denigrate King worked. In August 1966 - as King was bringing his civil rights campaign to Northern cities to address poverty, slums, housing segregation and bank lending discrimination - the Gallup Poll found that 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33 percent who viewed him favorably.

''Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. The most recent Gallup Poll discovered that 94 percent of Americans viewed him in a positive light. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. In 1964, at age 35, he was the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King's name to justify their beliefs and actions.

''In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America's class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation's labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike. He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.

''In his final speech in Memphis the night before he was killed, King told the crowd about a bomb threat on his plane from Atlanta that morning, saying he knew that his life was constantly in danger because of his political activism.

"I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

''We haven't gotten there yet. But Dr. King is still with us in spirit. The best way to honor his memory is to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers' rights, racial equality, peace and social justice.''

As for what MLK did say, consider inter alia : ''The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

''The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.'' from :

One of the great ironies of history and contemporary politics is that the word “freedom,” so central to Martin Luther King Jr.’s life’s work, has largely come to be associated with conservative and libertarian groups whose use of the word bears little relationship to the ideals for which King struggled.

The libertarian worldview frames freedom in opposition to government. But while King did indeed battle oppressive government under Jim Crow, his struggle was not only against that government; he also championed freedom from private sector discrimination, freedom from poverty and freedom from citizens who would use the guise of taking the law into their own hands to lynch African Americans. So while anti-government right-wingers today tend to shout about freedom until they’re blue in the face, their conception of the word is so narrow and shortsighted that it actually becomes corrosive to our politics and culture.

In fairness, conservatives and libertarians are not wrong in their assessment that most government actions do, in some way, represent a restriction of freedom. When a government raises taxes on a wealthy individual, that individual is, to some degree, less free. When a business is required by government regulation to meet certain requirements, it is less free as well.

What libertarians and conservatives typically fail to recognize, however, is that freedoms do not exist in a vacuum and no freedom is absolute. Instead, real freedoms almost always require trade-offs. When a business is forced to serve any patron regardless of race, the business owner loses the freedom to discriminate — a freedom defended in King’s time by conservative standard-bearer Barry Goldwater and more recently by Rand Paul. On the other hand, once that freedom to discriminate was denied by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a large group of people gained the freedom to patronize whatever establishment they chose.

The question is whether that trade-off of freedom is worthwhile. I suspect that most Americans would believe it’s a fair trade, especially considering that market forces were demonstrably not enough to defeat Jim Crow.

Poverty and lack of economic opportunity represent a type of denial of freedom as well. If a child cannot access the kind of education that will allow her to make a living, she is less free. If the government taxes the income of a wealthy individual to pay for the education that can liberate that child, it becomes a matter of judgment whether the freedom lost at the top of the economic ladder has been justified by the increase of freedom at the bottom of it. That is an area where people of good conscience can disagree, but to express outrage over the “tyranny” of taxation without acknowledging the freedom government also provides is foolhardy at best and dishonest at worst.

Inevitably, conservatives and libertarians argue that they support helping the poor but not through the apparatus of the state, that such efforts are better served through private charity. The problem is that charity can achieve only a fraction of the service to the poor that government does. Indeed, government intervention is literally the only thing that has prevented an explosion of poverty in the last 50 years. If we are to understand poverty as a denial of freedom, that means government assistance to the poor has done a great deal to provide freedom, even if that freedom has been financed by taxation on the wealthy — who still seem to be pretty free to me.

Finally, many conservatives and libertarians advocate even the freedom of individuals to take the law into their own hands, typically through some combination of “stand your ground” laws and extreme readings of the 2d Amendment. Shirts that read “I don't call 911” are hot items at gun shows, and efforts to regulate 2nd Amendment rights are routinely branded as tyranny. But as the Jim Crow era proved, there is also tyranny in anarchy, as black communities were terrorized by their well-armed white neighbors. The government can provide freedom by taking the law out of the hands of vigilantes.

"...at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the most significant threat to peace on the planet. The US was voted top threat by a wide margin, receiving 24% of the vote. Pakistan was a very distant second with 8%, followed by China (6%). Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea tied for fourth place at 4%."

let's be clear - it is a different question not a better one. for someone living in Iraq. Pakistan, yemem, Syria (should I keep going) it probably doesn't matter much to them what is happening in Michigan.

he would say to keep working to change the country for the better - and that it is VERY sad to see a black man in the white house murdering people all around the world - and once again he would reiterate - “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.”

you don't know me at all so please don't make assumptions. if you want to know what I think of what is going on in the states, fine. I think the south should have been allowed to secede. the governors in too many states are reactionaries - mostly the republicans but once again I am concerned that even the supposed liberal dems are shills for the rich and corporations. now they have to get their money from somebody and those in the bottom 90% don't have much. the system needs big time overhaul. I understand if the states are your main focus but it was not the subject of this post. must everything be diverted to your agenda?

nj - no dis intended although I liked Malcolm x more than mlk. I know what he would have said to president McCain but he did not get elected - remember. by the way - just so you know - the website puts capitals on certain nouns - not me.

time to read what he said and not spout nonsense. why do you think he was in Memphis - to do some sort of electoral politics. why do you think he championed the bus boycott or the march on Washington. this is occupy here son or didn't you know that - not huff post or move on.

and you are a valued member of the occupy movement - or maybe the democratic party - that has no business here. as to my ideas - what do you know about them. is something I said upsetting you? was it the murdering part - the fact that it is accurate - what is it?

If you say so. I just didn't think Occupy was a Michigan entity, contrary to how many times Snooze tries to turn the conversation around to it. Like this thread. What in the world does MI have to do with MLK/Obumbler?

I think it has more to do with the lack of acknowledgment that there is exploitation in the states via state legislation. Asking what MLK would say is borderline mental masturbation. The most common deflection on the forum is war. But, when you go beyond the broad analysis that is usually written by someone else, the arguments most often fall apart because there is no real interest in it. It's not that the case can't be made. It surely can but it isn't done or it is done so poorly that it is merely distraction. One decries foreign policy exploitation and neglects the legislation that is written in their own state. If I am wrong then Shooz will correct it.

It's a shame because there are two arguments that could be made for the they are both the same bullshit. One is education. The second is foreign policy. I told you guys two years ago that our foreign policy hasn't changed in about 100 years. Only our domestic policy changes.

Talk about a gratuitous and completely meaningless attack. It has become absolutely obvious you don't care about this forum or Occupy one bit. You make no efforts at all to try and build a community. None. All the opposite. All your efforts are designed to ruin it.

Yes I have BUT actually u should really consider : Just whoTF are u to even to require that other people should somehow open your links to engage with your points when u fail utterly in doing that yourself ?!!! 'Hypocrite' is yet another word we may fairly ascribe to u !! Sheeesh !

"Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants. The only solution is World Revolution."

All revolutions spark counter-revolutionaries. Seems we got ourselves a few here.

I think MLK would tell Obama, "Don't be a counter-revolutionary. Don't stop progress. We aren't where we need to be yet."

"As we now know, Obama’s imperial rhetoric was not empty. With the cooperation of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, he did in fact increase Pentagon spending and expand the Army and Marine Corps to create the largest and most powerful military in the history of the world, tripled down in Afghanistan and Pakistan, launched new military operations in Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, and maintained 50,000 troops in Iraq." From Russell.

''In his final book, the civil rights leader laid out his vision for a universal basic income that would raise all Americans into the middle class.'' - 50 years ago MLK was much more 'progressive' than any number of his would-be successors are now .. up to and including The POTUS, who as Russel understood, is very much a product of his early upbringing, although TR doesn't touch on any of his subsequent (se)lection.

Thanx for your very absorbing link which I recommend to others. Very Interesting. Finally, MLK Jnr. was joining dots and moving to The Real Left in the months before he was assassinated - something well known to those who were spying on him.

All the more reason for a Basic Income Guarantee. We don't need people to be struggling as they are. There is actually plenty of money in the economy. It simply needs to be shared properly among the masses and not hoarded at the top.

Hmmm, ''comprehension problems'' ?! Your capacity to ''hear'' incorrectly and to deceptively only detect what u want to is rather obvious there & where'd I say ''no'' to anything, lol ?!! You're fooling nobody here other than possibly yourself !!!

And people that have a tendency to run bots and hide behind multiple IDs have a tendency to get treated like dirtbags. Reflect on that. You instigate and I pat you on your head for the repetitive nature of it.

Actually, you have demonstrated that you are incapable. That's ok. I understand. There are those who are capable of comprehending conflict resolution and those who lack the ability to do so. You clearly cannot. Again, that's ok. There's no shame in that. Really.

Actually what has been demonstrated is your capability to be exposed as a Neocon, AIPAC Likudnik shill !!! It is u who really seems incapable of ''comprehending conflict resolution'' via The South African Paradigm !! It is u who posts as u do and ''that's ok'' ... but there IS .. ''shame in that. Really''.

I on the other hand, have been shown 'capable' of assisting u in exposing your Neocon self here :

You are clearly inadequate, a liar and a troll. I am getting a kick of how you and one of your imbecile pets talk about the money involved in politics yet proclaim that PR firms should have a voice. Ya, what you clowns really meant to say was that corporations are people too.

I ask you this, because you are all of a sudden into mental masturbation, solve the problem by doing what? Light weapons are moved into Syria without detection. You and I both know that the US is supporting the rebels. Hell, Hamas, recently smuggled a tiger into Gaza-see what I am saying here?. The UN is aware that medical and food supplies have been an issue since September.

IF one of the principle functions of government is the provision of stability and with it the rule of law, whereby justice is dispensed without regard to race, class, sex, ethnicity, religion, or clan, and IF an institutionalization of preference under the law as a matter of precedent takes place under government, THEN a mockery of Justice becomes the law of the land.

Mockery for Mockery, is that not Just?
↥twinkle ↧stinkle permalink

Real or imaginary? Considering the level of propaganda by those operating purely by self interest.....what happens when it is simply not true or taken out of context? At some point it becomes a convicted in the court of public opinion thang. You know, like most sane people bash Nancy Grace for doing.

war crimes - I guess that would depend on whether the siege is considered part of an international conflict or not. Certainly aspects of this civil war are international in scope, the Palestinian refugees kinda fit in with the international character, along with al Qaeda and Hezbollah.

But I'm not a lawyer.
↥twinkle ↧stinkle permalink

Geneva Convention Protocols. I started looking at different phrases that were used in the articles---which of course is subject to who owns that particular news outlet. He is at war.

BUT, if you could convince the public that Assad was the one that was doing the preventing then-who would object?

The PFLP-GC which was aligned with Assad attempted to control the camp but the people rejected it. The FSA entered the camp in December 2012 and the camp was bombed. According to the interview in the above link, the FSA was asked to stay. There were supposedly about 9 factions in the camp and they stopped getting along rather quickly and many Palestinians were forced to take sides. After July 2013 the camp was under siege and in November of 2013 a deal was arranged for all militants to leave the camp, but they didn't.

Depending on whom you read, it's a finger pointing game as to whom is denying aid. Much of which is accusatory in nature of Assad. But, he isn't the one that is not allowing aid in. It's those inside the camp that are not allowing aid in. One of the articles that I listed in my prior post indicates that the Assad had attempted to get supplies in as well.

Call me crazy but that is important because if Assad is shown to be preventing aid from reaching the camp then he would be guilty of war crimes.

Like thus:
(c) Starvation

The prohibition to starve civilians as a “method of warfare” is included in Article 54 of Protocol I and Article 14 of Protocol II. “To use starvation as a method of warfare would be to provoke it deliberately, causing the population to suffer hunger, particularly by depriving it of its sources of food or of supplies.” [50 ] Starvation is not specifically mentioned as a grave breach in Protocol I. However, the Appeal Chamber of the ICTY confirmed in the Tadic case that even if the Geneva Conventions and Protocols do not explicitly stipulate that a prohibited act constitutes a crime, it is still possible to establish criminal responsibility for such an act. [51 ]

The Statute of the ICC explicitly mentions the denial of humanitarian assistance as an example of an act that may lead to starvation. According to the relevant provision, “[i ] ntentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions” is a serious violation of the laws and customs of war [52 ] . However, starvation has been included in the jurisdiction of the ICC only in respect of international armed conflicts, although there has been a considerable amount of lobbying for its inclusion in the list of crimes committed in non-international armed conflicts as well. This is regrettable since the prohibition of starvation is also mentioned in Protocol II [53 ] . In accordance with Article 10 of the ICC Statute, this omission will not, however, change the customary status of the rule [54 ] . As a matter of present customary international law, starvation can constitute a war crime regardless of the kind of conflict in which it occurs. [55 ]

In some cases, it might be difficult to prove the specific intent to use starvation as a method of warfare, i.e., as “a weapon to annihilate or weaken the population” [56 ] . However, if the outcome of impeding humanitarian assistance is obvious according to the ordinary course of events, the intention can be inferred. Military necessity cannot serve as a justification, as even during sieges or blockades relief operations must be allowed. [57 ] link

Dude, I am willing to hear what you have to say right up until the time that you choose to act like an ass. At that point in time, I stop listening to what you have to say and I will give you advance notification before I do. You have no idea what it is that is to my liking as you have thus far refused to hear what I have to say.

dude? well I think that I am horrified by what goes on in the world today. in too many places. I am horrified by the conditions that people must live under while we live in comfort. I am disgusted at what my government has done to make too many of these situations worse not better. I am disgusted by what our government has done to the "middle east" for oil! I am disgusted by the fact that too many in our own country struggle to get by in the richest country the world has ever seen! and I seen very little in my lifetime that tells me that the democratic party is helping to make this a better world. a democratic president sent my best friend to Vietnam to kill poor people and to die himself. a democratic president ended welfare as we know it and twisted arms to pass nafta - I could go on but you get the picture. and now we have a black man in the white house - it made my father so proud when he was elected - and he didn't buy Chomsky and nader that it would be more of the same. luckily my dad didn't live to see what has become of his democrats. that is why I went to the zuccotti park - and it was everything I hoped it would be. I am saddened that this forum is not more interesting and effective. I cannot figure out what some are trying to do here. I understood the free market guys who were trying to disrupt the movement but not this. ok is that turd like?

“If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.”
― Mark Twain..........Emma didn’t believe in voting. "If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal," she observed. ........if you know the history behind that last quote you will know how accurate it is. if you understand the occupy movement and the thinking of those behind it than you will know that it is a movement of action and pressure not voting. for not for the murderer in the white house.